David Lynch
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It’s a Strange World, Isn’t It? February 14, 2025
I have this superstition that something bad will happen if I press “SKIP INTRO” on the credits of Twin Peaks. This is not really out of fealty to David Lynch (to be honest, I watch movies on my iPhone all the time); nor do I identify as a particularl...
The Shocking Realism of David Lynch January 31, 2025
David Lynch has died at the age of 78. With his death, we have lost the most eccentric of the directors who made their name in the 1980s and 1990s, at the apex of American confidence. The present moment of confusion makes that situation almost unimag...
Remembering 'Twin Peaks' January 30, 2025
Mark Frost (co-creator): I first met David Lynch in 1985. I had seen Eraserhead in 1979 at a midnight showing in Minneapolis, and I walked out with the oddest feeling and said: “Someday I’m going to work with that guy.” Six years later, a mutual agen...
American Upanishad January 29, 2025
There is a poetic not justice, but balance, to how David Lynch came to be the emblematic casualty of the LA fires. Never outfoxed, he was somehow outsmoked by a lethal injection of poisons the description of which reads like a post-apocalyptic terraf...
David Lynch’s Electric Dreams and Atomic Nightmares January 28, 2025
The loss of David Lynch — the great American filmmaker, painter, musician, and transcendental meditation evangelist — is profound. More than any other American artist, Lynch peered at the opaque conditions of contemporary life and saw the sheer horr...
David Lynch’s Popularity Is a Judgment Against Us January 24, 2025
The decades-long valorization and near-deification of the late filmmaker David Lynch is a sign of declining cultural standards and decaying societal values.Long ago, the public flocked to films by directors whose artistic visions, however distinct or...
David Lynch's Cigarette Cinema January 23, 2025
The kitchen of Laura Palmer’s house is dark although it’s morning, and her mother Sarah Palmer is smoking, calling for her daughter to get ready for school. From the dead look on her face, she knows on some instinctive level what is about to happen; ...
Women in Trouble January 23, 2025
The first film David Lynch ever saw, when he was six years old, was a 1952 melodrama by the director Henry King called Wait Till the Sun Shines, Nellie. Shot in bright orange candlelight and deep nocturnal blues, it offers a prehistory for the kind o...
David Lynch’s Guts January 23, 2025
In David Lynch’s Blue Velvet, college student Jeffrey Beaumont (Kyle MacLachlan) discovers that he’s both a detective and a pervert. The lengthy, disturbing sequence—involving Jeffrey as a Peeping Tom who witnesses a rape—contributed to the controver...
The Soul of David Lynch January 22, 2025
On January 16, we lost David Lynch, at age 78, just shy of his January 20 birthday. That would be January 20, 1946. Lynch was a Baby Boomer. A child of ’50s America. In other words, paradise was his birthright and the loss of paradise the theme of hi...
When David Lynch Played It Straight January 22, 2025
Early on in The Straight Story, the 1999 drama that David Lynch called his “most experimental film,” a doctor tells 73-year-old Alvin Straight that he likely has emphysema and that if he doesn’t make some lifestyle changes, there will be consequences...
The Inimitable Weirdness of David Lynch January 22, 2025
The Fabelmans, Steven Spielberg’s 2022, barely coded biopic of his own artistic adolescence, ends with a young Sammy Fabelman (the Spielberg stand-in) granted an audience with his hero, the legendary American director John Ford. Sitting in a dim offi...
The Unsettling Genius of David Lynch January 21, 2025
In trying to write on David Lynch one begins to understand why words did not come easily to him. In a beloved clip of the surrealist filmmaker, who died this week at 78, an interviewer asked him to “elaborate” on his statement that Eraserhead is his ...
The Wild Heart of David Lynch January 21, 2025
No doubt I was little amped up, an excitable David Lynch fan sitting down to the Pilot episode of Twin Peaks, and my slight mania may have heightened the impression, but when the opening credits started rolling my head almost exploded with how slow t...
Meeting David Lynch on the Dreaming Plane January 20, 2025
A Lynch anecdote. It’s 1988, and I’m a senior in high school. I make my first college visit, on my own, planning to stay with a sophomore who was an alumnus of my high school, whom I knew from the debate team. My first night there, I go to the studen...
An Absurdly American Life January 20, 2025
For two and a half years, David Lynch delivered a daily weather report on his YouTube channel. In the final video, posted on December 16th, 2022, Lynch opens the routine report shaking his phone camera while delightfully proclaiming, “If you can beli...
David Lynch and The Art Spirit January 20, 2025
I recently watched the 2016 documentary “David Lynch: The Art Life”. It focused on Lynch’s early years: his childhood, his difficulties at school, his art student period, up to the making of his first feature film Eraserhead (1977).I like these “e...
David Lynch’s Errand Into the Wilderness January 20, 2025
Nathaniel Hawthorne’s classic 1835 story “Young Goodman Brown,” set in the New England of two centuries prior, tells the story of a young Puritan’s loss of faith not only in God but in his wife and his community. Wandering out into the woods one nigh...
David Lynch Was a Singular Filmmaker January 17, 2025
There are certain artists who are so visionary, so daring in their originality, whose work casts such a primal and enduring spell that it literally becomes hard to imagine the world without them. David Lynch, who died this week at 78, was one of thos...
Twin Peaks and the Divine September 18, 2024
A few weeks back, on an episode of the pod that turned very existential, Twitter's Audrey Horne (rightly) pressed me about what she felt was a cop-out response. I had invoked “art” and “the sublime” as a possible answer to dealing with existing in an...
Cultural Engineers and Their Nightmares February 14, 2024
In one of the opening scenes of David Lynch’s 2001 highly-acclaimed film Mulholland Drive, Dan, played by Patrick Fischler, displays a growing sense of dread as he describes his terrible dream to his friend Herb. Embarrassed, Dan sits across from Her...
